


Crepe Suzanne

by Cerusee



Category: Batgirl (Comics), Batman (Comics)
Genre: Coffee, Gen, Hugging, Stephanie cries because I’m incapable of not doing that, a soft and gentle Batdad, concussion, it’s the least Stephanie deserves, the inevitable waffles
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-14
Updated: 2018-11-14
Packaged: 2019-08-23 10:40:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,683
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16617398
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cerusee/pseuds/Cerusee
Summary: Steph stumbles from a concussion to a confusion: Bruce Wayne in the kitchen, manning a waffle iron.





	Crepe Suzanne

It was the sunlight that finally roused her. 

Steph pulled the pillow over her head, trying desperately to sink back into the sleep that dragged at her eyes. The light of the rising sun kept edging into her vision, though, and finally, Steph gave up and opened her reluctant eyes.

_Ugh,_ sun. 

Her skull was throbbing.

Steph pushed herself up from the bed, and looked around the room. This was...nicer than what she was used to. The sheets felt smooth and clean under her skin. Not sometime-in-the-last-month-clean: _yesterday’s laundry_ clean. The curtains were wall to floor, green with dark blue—not, in her opinion, doing a good enough job of keeping the morning light out.

(A few months ago, Steph had put up butcher paper up over all her windows because she was tired of being woken up by sun. Crystal had walked into Steph’s bedroom with clean towels later that day, looked around, set her mouth, and left without a word.)

Steph sat on the edge of the bed for a few minutes, trying to remember the previous night. She had a faint memory of being punched in the face, of grasping at her nose and finding more blood than she’d been expecting. She tried to mentally catalog the likely symptoms of a concussion, until thinking that hard pushed her to the point of nausea, and she decided that what she really needed to do, more than anything else, was to go downstairs, swipe a Gatorade from the Wayne family kitchen, and sneak out before she had to talk to anyone.

Her plan went pretty well right up until she reached the actual kitchen.

The enticing sound and smell of sizzling batter hit hit Steph just before the sight of _Bruce Wayne_ , clad in a ratty old magenta dressing gown, hunched slightly over the kitchen counter.

“What the effing duck?” Steph wondered aloud. She wanted to scuttle out of the place, but she was starving and she smelled food. Pancakey food.

Bruce glanced over his shoulder at her. “Sit down.”

“Why should I?” Steph said, reflexively.

Bruce raised his head again, fixing her with an exasperated glance. “You have a concussion, Stephanie.”

“Yeah, well,” and Steph took a minute to think about it. _Crap_. She did. They’d been over this last night. She had a hazy memory of some kind of negotiation. She wasn’t she what she’d gotten out of whatever deal they’d struck. “It’s not like it’s the _first_ time.” Nevertheless, she sat, and Bruce slid a mug of steaming black coffee over at her. She wrinkled her nose, and then took a sip anyway.

“That doesn’t make it better,” Bruce said, briskly, lifting a lid, releasing a waft of fragrant steam, and _there_ was the source of that pancake smell, and holy crap, was that a real _waffle iron?_

“Hold up. You _never_ cook.” Steph blurted out.

Bruce’s lip curled just a little. “I dabble.” He forked a perfect set of waffles out of the iron, then threw a towel over them while he poured another round of batter into the iron from a glass pitcher Steph hadn’t even noticed sitting on the counter. 

Dangnabbed concussion.

Bruce was buttering the finished waffles and drizzling them with syrup, then stacking them and sliding them over to Steph while she was still gaping at him.

“Why are you doing this?”

“Alfred is in Tiajuana until Tuesday.”

Steph rolled her eyes, but she was hugely hungry, so she cut off a sizable forkful of waffles and ate them anyway.

They were amazing. Light, fluffy, buttery; just the right amount of sweet—better than Mom’s; _significantly_ better than Alfred’s, bless his soul; better than anything she’d had in a diner even where they did waffles all day.

“Oh my god,” she said, around a mouthful of bliss. “These are really good, Bruce.”

“Thank you,” he said, sitting down opposite her, neatly cutting off a toppling corner of his own assembled stack.

“So, uh,” Steph mumbled around her latest mouthful. “I don’t really remember last night.”

“You were violently thrown against a stairwell bannister,” Bruce told her.

_How classy of me_. “What about those guys—”

“They’re all in custody.”

“It’s probably too soon to know—”

“Yes, it is. But Jim looked over the evidence we brought in. It’s solid. He thinks the DA will be able to bring a strong case into court.” 

“Great,” Steph said, forking down another mouthful of the waffles that had no call to be so addictively scrumptious. This was so _weird_ ; eating fluffy breakfast foods with Bruce, of all people, making small talk about the costumed life— _crap_ , for some reason, her eyes had gone watery. Also, what was _we_ ; clearly she’d been out of the fight since before it started.

They ate in silence for several more minutes.

Finally, Stephanie was done with her own plate, and she pushed it to the side. Bruce wasn’t exactly rushing, so she sat back and watched him peacefully work through his own waffles.

As he was mopping up the last traces of syrup on his plate, she said, “Tim never mentioned this.”

“Nevva mentio wah?” Bruce asked, with his mouth full.

“Waffle Tuesday. Or whatever day this actually is.”

Bruce chewed and swallowed. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.

“I’m not complaining,” Steph said, even though her heart rate was picking up and her cheeks felt hot. “We… _I_...ruined Batman and Robin before we really had a chance. It’s nice of you to give me this.”

“Stephanie,” Bruce said, very carefully, his hand fiddling with a discarded fork, and then laying it very gently against a plate, without so much as a _clink!_ “First of all, my Batman and your Robin is another conversation completely.”

Stephanie blinked rapidly, and swallowed against a vivid surge of emotion. “Mmm?”

“Aside from that, I have no idea what on Earth you’re talking about.”

“Well, I don’t know either!” Steph blurted out. “Either you’re doing this on purpose or it’s just some dumb Batman thing you do with everyone else that I missed out on!”

“Stephanie?” Bruce said, now openly concerned, and reached out to take her hand.

She didn’t mean to yank it away; she didn’t mean to burst into tears.

“These stupid _waffles_ ,” she sobbed, into hands pressed against her face. “You’re such a son of a bitch.”

“Stephanie,” Bruce said again, gently, and she realized he’d moved seats so he was sitting beside her, his hand feather-light against her back. “I really don’t know what you mean.”

Steph clenched her eyes shut tight, but it wasn’t enough to stop the tears. “It was when you were dead,” she said, in a watery voice, making air quotes around the word “dead”. “When Cass ran away from Gotham and everything that mattered in her entire life, and left me Batgirl. I was, I was trying to make things work with Mom. We’ve had such a bad...she was trying to make things work, too. And for some reason, she decided that our second act as mother and daughter meant making me fresh waffles every morning.”

“Ah,” Bruce said, awkwardly. “Well. That wasn’t...I wasn’t aware...how were they?”

“Not as good as yours,” Stephanie said, her voice choked. “But better than Alfred’s.” She scrubbed at her eyes. “You should talk to him about them, you know. Crappy waffles; that’s a big blind spot for someone who cooks like Alfred cooks.”

“I’d rather die,” Bruce said. “Again.” Steph glanced up at him, and he was smiling in the most awkward manner imaginable.

“Don’t you even _dare!_ ” And then, damn it, she was sobbing again.

“I’m sorry?” Bruce said, and she thought he was still trying to smile at her.

She punched him in his stupidly massive chest. He didn’t flinch.

“I hate you!” Steph ground out. “I _hate_ you.”

“Stephanie,” Bruce said, helplessly, catching her wrists and pulling her towards him. “Come on, sweetheart…”

No one had ever called her _sweetheart_ before. Not in a _nice_ way, anyway. Only strange men in the street, and when they said it, it made her flesh crawl.

_Not your dad_ , she reminded herself, while she slowly calmed, in Batman’s arms. _Not your dad_.

In good times and in bad, til—-

“You’re not allowed to die,” she mumbled into his fuzzy pink shoulder.

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Bruce said. He stroked the bird nest currently masquerading as her hair.

“When they come for you, tell ‘em I said ‘no’”.

Bruce didn’t answer her, only held her tighter, for a long, long time.

***

“Bruce?” Steph said quietly, when they were both—okay, this was mostly about her—calm enough to have relaxed in their chairs, Bruce gazing into the depths of his coffee cup, Steph idly drawing patterns in the remnants of syrup on her plate, and periodically licking the tines of her fork. “Is this…. _our_ second act?”

Bruce was silent for so long that Steph was momentarily convinced she’d grossly misjudged the everything of anything. “Batman?” she whispered.

“I’ve always regretted our first act, Stephanie,” Bruce said, slowly. “And I wasn’t...aware. About your mother. This was—” Bruce stopped and drained half a cup of cold coffee in one long gulp, and then cleared his throat. “When I was very young, I would help _my_ mother make waffles.”

“Oh,” Steph said.

“It’s the only thing I know how to do well,” Bruce said, with a crooked smile. 

“In the kitchen?”

“Mm-hmm,” Bruce said. “In the kitchen.” He stood and stretched, shuffled over to the counter with mug in hand and took the coffee pot off the burner. “I do know how to do a few other things.”

“Yeah?” Steph lobbed her empty coffee cup at him, and Bruce caught it without looking, twisting his free arm up behind his back and looping his forefinger through the handle, swinging the cup up in front of him. Steph grinned. “Hit me.”

Bruce’s head was bent over the coffee pot, but Steph could see the smile hinting around his mouth as he poured her a second cup.


End file.
